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In honor of Yom HaShoa, the Day of Remembrance in which we give honor to those who lost lives and family in the Holocaust, there were two things happening in the central atrium at my college. There was a gallery of photos of local Holocaust survivors along with their stories, and a group of Tibetan monks creating a sand mandala. They painstakingly dropped grains of brightly-colored sand in an intricate pattern that represents the positive energy of the Buddha gathered in that place. It takes several days to complete the mandala, and then it is ritually destroyed. The sand is gathered up and poured into a nearby river, allowing the positive energy to be released into the world as the river carries it to the boundless ocean.

I post this picture because it shows different kinds of focus. The focus of the monk is obvious, as he builds up a beautiful house for God grain by grain. Around the room, students stopped in their rush from class to class to focus for a moment on deeper stories of pain and perseverance. For one week in April, the atrium was a place of quiet remembrance, of sadness and hope for the future, of the deliberate invocation of peace.